The New Rome

For a city that is celebrating its 2,763rd birthday, and which sometimes seems suffocated by history, 'new' doesn't seem right. But Rome is open to modernity. Like the character Tancredi in The Leopard, it believes that 'if we want everything to stay as it is, we have to let everything change'. Take the piazza Navona, one of the great baroque open spaces, built on what was a first-century-AD stadium for chariot races. It is now among more than a hundred Wi-Fi 'hotspots' in the historic centre where you can go online free of charge. If you haven't been to Rome for a few years, swing by: this is a place where old and new illuminate each other in surprising ways.

Read on to see which modern must-sees we recommend while you're there...

It is more than 10 years since the Italian ministry of culture awarded Zaha Hadid's London-based studio the contract for MAXXI, a new 'museum of the 21st century' in the northern Roman suburbs, dedicated in equal measure to contemporary art and architecture. For a while political wrangles and budgetary issues delayed the project; but the final result is a building that puts Rome up there with Bilbao, Paris, Berlin and Los Angeles on the world map of contemporary architecture. As striking inside as out, Hadid's remarkable concrete-and-glass structure ditches the traditional room-by-room museum layout in favour of an open, dynamic flow. Nothing is safe or stable; sloping floors induce a slight queasiness; and at one point, in the highest room, a glass-covered gash in the floor gives a sudden, dizzying, Google Earth view of the lobby. The top floor is given over to temporary exhibitions, while the first two house the museum's permanent art and architecture collection.

Armando Manni is one of those people who are annoyingly good at everything. Having made a promising debut as a film director in the 1990s, Manni got bored with Italy's film business and moved up to his Tuscan country house to make one of the world's best olive oils. Now he has turned his attention to holiday accommodation. Casa Manni is an apartment for two, between the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon. What makes it special is not just the suave interior by Adam D Tihany, the La Tavola tableware, the Pratesi sheets and the terrace with a view over the second-century column of Marcus Aurelius; it is also the way the guest experience is curated. Exclusive tailored tours are available, led by Rome-based experts such as New York Times food writer Maureen Fant and archaeologist Paolo Lenzi. The 'honesty bar' is a climate-controlled wine cellar stocked with bottles that you order when booking. And if you want an up-and-coming Roman chef to cook dinner, that's no problem. Considering what you get, it's good value for money, too: it costs less than a junior suite in many of Rome's luxury hotels.

Anyone who has been to Milan or Turin will be familiar with the time-honoured rite of the evening apertivo. But only recently have Romans adopted the bar as their chief venue for evening socialising; and some smart bar owners have begun to offer nibbles as well as wine and cocktails. The food is free: you just pay for drinks, which are marked up a euro or so. The trend was started in two buzzy bars owned by a couple of Turinese gallery owners: Société Lutèce in dinky little piazza di Montevecchio, not far from piazza Navona, and Freni e Frizioni ('Brakes and Clutch': it used to be a garage) on the road alongside the River Tiber in Trastevere. At the Scandinavian-style Tree Bar, pictured above, in the up-and-coming Flaminio district, Monday is apertivo-dinner night: between 7pm and 1am a buffet of gourmet Mediterranean tapas is laid on for a fixed price of €5, and you even get a live DJ set.

Some of the other new apertivo hangouts, such as the shabby-chic Etabli, pictured above, in the centro storico and 1970s-funk-themed Bar Necci in the fashionable Pigneto district, double up as bar and restaurant…

Filippo La Manta has always been on the front line: first in his native Palermo as a news photographer specialising in Mafia stories, now as one of Rome's most talked-about chefs. He works the room so effortlessly and has so many celebrity friends that you might be forgiven for wondering whether it is media coverage that's most important to him. But then you taste what's on the plate. La Mantia's cuisine is declaredly Sicilian, but with a light, creative twist. Onion and garlic are banned, and he likes to play around with dishes such as caponata (a sort of Sicilian ratatouille) by adding citrus fruits to the mix. His culinary touchstones are basil, mint, pine nuts, almonds, oregano, capers and pesce azzurro (anchovies and sardines); and he offers a broad selection of Sicilian wines, many of them from small, up-and-coming producers.

After making his mark at Trattoria, an eco-minimalist restaurant near the Pantheon, La Mantia opened under his own name in autumn 2009 when the management of the Hotel Majestic in via Veneto gave him its opulent first-floor dining room, above, to play with. The decor may be tongue-in-cheek La Dolce Vita, but the prices are reasonable: unlike most of Rome's high-end hotel restauranteurs, La Mantia believes that value for money is part of a good night out.

Rome is not usually rated one of Europe's great performing-arts cities. The Teatro dell'Opera di Roma has had more downs than ups in the last couple of decades, and the city's theatrical productions tend to be either stale and stagy or po-faced and experimental. But there are two exceptions to this, two institutions that allow Rome to hold its own with Salzburg, Milan and Avignon. The first is the Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus. Founded by Pope Sixtus V in 1585, Rome's leading classical orchestra was respected but hardly revered internationally until the appointment of Antonio Pappano (pictured at the orchestra's main venue, the Sala Santa Cecilia in the Auditorium Parco della Musica) as musical director in 2005.

The concert hall is worth a look, too: designed by Renzo Piano, the Auditorium Parco della Musica is (like the Pompidiou Centre, the Genoese architect's youthful collaboration with Richard Rogers) both cutting-edge and hugely popular with the locals.